Everything was supposed to change once Donald Trump became the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee.
He would stop with the barking and bickering and racist comments, hunker down in the dozen or so states deemed likely to decide the November election, and go on the sort of hiring and campaign-building spree that, history suggests, a candidate needs to do to seriously vie for the White House.
But the Manhattan business executive and reality TV star continues to defy expectations.
Rather than seek to unite the party, he keeps picking fights with fellow Republicans. He let go the strategist he had hired to expand his team in battleground states and devoted several days to campaigning across California, which he vows to contest in the fall — along with strongly Democratic New York — despite vanishingly small odds of success.
Donald Trump ended the day by doing something he rarely does: reading a prime-time speech from a teleprompter. Here are some highlights.
He soon plans to go abroad — at a time when he could be fundraising to replenish the GOP’s drained coffers — not to meet with foreign leaders, but to promote his golf resorts in Ireland and Scotland.
In short, Trump continues to be Trump, an approach that accounts for a great part of his success to this point but represents a considerable gamble: a wager that the gravity-defying strategy that won him the GOP nomination can succeed under the far greater rigors ahead.
